As much as Crimson Desert has resonated with numerous players, with each update pushing its approval even higher, most everyone can agree that the story isn’t great. Heck, even Pearl Abyss’s CEO feels the same way. Amid reports that things changed significantly in development, Alec Newman, who plays Kliff, revealed just how turbulent the entire process was.
“In fact, for the first year and a half or so, it was just a demo as far as I knew,” he told the Friends Per Second Podcast (transcription via This Week in Video Games). “They sort of said, ‘Well, we’re going to start recording in earnest now.’ And I went, ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!’” Newman spent five years on the project, describing it as having “various periods of low and then very high intensity.”
Even when recording properly kicked off, it was with cards describing characters from each faction in Pywel. “With this project, it was interesting because they kind of, I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel, you know, various characters and ‘he’s from this faction, and he’s from that faction,’” he said. “And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
About two and a half years in, Newman claims that Pearl Abyss “really wanted” the Greymanes aspect to “resonate.” “This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. I think that’s the main story strand of the game, or the only story strand of the game when you begin. I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to care about his comrades,’ and I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue.’
“So we brought it in gradually, and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out. But I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.” In the end, he wanted a protagonist that wasn’t stoic, noting that “it’s very, very hard to play 150 hours with somebody who doesn’t give anything away ever.”
Despite Newman and other actors putting in significant work, it’s hard to argue against the weak characterization, especially for Kliff. Still, you have to give him credit for trying, especially over such a long period.
On the gameplay front, at least, Crimson Desert is getting better. The latest patch added five permanent mounts, changed sprinting to require holding the button down, reduced the stamina cost of gliding, and more. Check out all the details here. There’s still more to improve – I’m going to continue advocating for the removal of the dragon mount cooldowns – but thus far, Pearl Abyss has been responding well to feedback, even as the core team moves on to DokeV.
